The Stooges have three really good albums – The Stooges (1969), Fun House (1970) and Raw Power (1973).
In 2007, the legendary punk band reunited for a fourth album. After the release of The Weirdness, The Stooges still had three great albums, but they also had one pretty bad one.
The Weirdness finds the reunited Stooges trying to stick to a winning formula, but failing.
Instead of an album with classic Stooge grit, the group produced an album that sounds noisy for the sake of noise.
Most of the album is essentially a guy banging mindlessly on drums, two guys meandering through heavily distorted guitar and bass riffs, some show off shredding every once in a while, and some guy blabbing about hanging around ATMs, being fried, or his di** turning into a tree.
The fact that these “guys” are The Stooges just makes it sadder. You would think they would know better.
Now, mindlessness has always been a big part of good punk music (The Stooges helped make this so) but there’s usually something else to it.
Most of the time, good punk bands pull off a mindless power by remaining unaware of it. On this album Iggy and the gang seem to be aware that the music and lyrics are mindless, and instead of letting it be, they try to take it to the next level.
Where once it was enough to say “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” now the band seems to be trying to make statements with the same language, and it just doesn’t work.
All of the attitude is mixed in with attempts to say something bigger, and it’s all sang over such a mess that the end result is just a disaster, really.
It’s hard to get points about war, poverty and Christianity across when they are interspersed with so many filler lines and drowned out by the rest of the band.
Some of the lines are cringe worthy, but it’s ironic ones like “The leaders of rock don’t rock/This bothers me quite a lot” that make The Weirdness particularly painful to listen to.
